3 ms·
Just to add color to the discussion above, what distinguishes a microcontroller from other chips is that the volatile memory is on the same piece of silicon as
by RC_ITR 4y ago
Just to add color to the discussion above, what distinguishes a microcontroller from other chips is that the volatile memory is on the same piece of silicon as the processing cores.
This allows for power saving because you don’t have to condition signals as they jump from silicon piece to silicon piece (oversimplification).
It is somewhat harder to make the above on smaller nodes than it is to make just processing cores or just memory.
That fact (in addition to a number of other cost and technical factors) is why microcontrollers lag process nodes.
- zorgmonkey 4y ago> It is somewhat harder to make the above on smaller nodes than it is to make just processing cores or just memory. I'm not convinced this is the reason because the microcontrollers I know of use SRAM not DRAM and SRAM is what CPU caches are (plus of course some extra logic for the cache management aspect). I am aware that designing dense and power efficient SRAM for a cell library is considered a pretty hard thing to do, but it seemingly has already been for modern processes.